The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space keeps on growing: new data from Gartner has argued the global market was worth $44.5 billion last year, with the hyperscalers further entrenching their positions.

The analyst firm said in a note the worldwide IaaS market grew 37.7% in 2019, with the top five players accounting for 80% of the market, up from 77% the year before.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) remained top of the shop as of the end of 2019, with Gartner estimating a 45% market share – albeit this is slightly reduced from 47.9% in 2018. Microsoft retains second place in Gartner’s figures with an improved market share of 17.9%. Alibaba Cloud is third in the ranking with 9.1% share, ahead of Google Cloud (5.3%) and Tencent (2.8%).

Google Cloud, however, saw the largest growth of the hyperscalers over the past 12 months, at 80.1%, compared with Microsoft (57.8%) and AWS (29.0%). Alibaba and Tecent saw growth of 62.4% and 101.5% respectively.

Gartner assesses its rankings based on revenues, with Alibaba – estimated at past $4bn for 2019, ahead of Google whose revenues were estimated at $2.4bn. It is worth noting, however, that Google Cloud began disclosing its full revenues in February this year, with its most recent quarterly posting breaking the $3bn mark for the first time. Synergy Research, in its analysis, puts Google in third place with an approximate market share of 9%.

While absolute growth numbers begin to slide below 100%, which is understandable given the astronomic performance, demand for cloud services remains as strong as ever as part of enterprise IT strategies. The Covid-19 pandemic, seeing more companies hasten remote working initiatives, has seen further dependence.

“Cloud underpins the push to digital business, which remains at the top of CIOs’ agendas,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “It enables technologies such as the edge, AI, machine learning and 5G, among others.

“At the end of the day, each of these technologies require a scalable, elastic and high capacity infrasturcture platform like public cloud IaaS, which is why the market witnessed strong growth,” added Nag.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

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